A packet of cigarettes comprises a group of cigarettes; a soft inner sheet of packing material, normally foil, wrapped about the group of cigarettes; and an outer sheet of packing material enclosing the inner sheet of packing material. The outer sheet of packing material may be soft or rigid, and, if rigid, is defined by a cardboard blank having preformed fold lines, and which is folded to form a rigid, hinged-lid packet of cigarettes.
Both soft and rigid packets of cigarettes are subsequently wrapped in a sheet of transparent plastic overwrapping material (normally cellophane or polypropylene), which is heat-sealed to preserve the moisture and aroma of the tobacco.
Packets of cigarettes sometimes contain a coupon in the form of a flat or pleated slip printed with advertising or collectors' item pictures. A coupon is normally located between the outer sheet of packing material and the sheet of transparent plastic overwrapping material, so that it is visible without opening the packet, and to prevent it coming into direct contact with the cigarettes, in which case the odour of the colourings in the print on the coupon may alter the aroma of the tobacco.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,105,340-B1 describes a method of producing packets of cigarettes with respective government stamps and coupons. More specifically, the packets of cigarettes are transferred in orderly succession directly from a packing machine to a cellophaning machine; a respective government stamp and respective coupon are applied to the outer surface of each packet of cigarettes as the packets are transferred; and a sheet of transparent packing material is wrapped and sealed about each packet of cigarettes and the respective government stamp and coupon.
A drawback of known methods, as described above, of producing a sealed packet of cigarettes with a coupon is the instability of the position and orientation of the coupon with respect to the packet, which obviously impairs the look of the finished packet. That is, between the point at which the coupon is applied to the packet of cigarettes, and the point at which the sheet of transparent packing material is wrapped about the packet and coupon, thus stabilizing the position and orientation of the coupon, the coupon undergoes random movements as the packet moves along.
By way of a solution to the above drawback, it has been proposed to supply the coupon together with the sheet of transparent packing material. This, however, involves serious design problems, by having to supply two different materials together in a precise relative position.
Another proposed solution is to fix the coupon to the packet of cigarettes with a spot of glue. This, however, is unpopular, on account of a portion of the coupon having to be torn off to detach the coupon from the packet, thus spoiling the look of the coupon and/or packet.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,757,667-A1 discloses a roll-wrapping method where rolls are wrapped with an envelope of heat-shrink plastic film with a label positioned between the envelope and roll and electrostatically bonded to the film; the bond prevents misalignment of the label prior to heat shrinking of the film onto the roll.
JP-7267217-A discloses an apparatus for holding an address label onto a bundle of articles during the feeding of the bundle of articles together with the address label to a wrapping station. Upstream from the wrapping station, it is provided a feeding station for feeding onto each bundle of articles an address label, so as the address label is arranged inside the package and is surround by a blank of the package. For preventing the address label from dropping from the bundle of articles during the transferring between the feeding station and the wrapping station, static electricity is charged to the address label so that the address label is sucked to the bundle of articles. In particular a charging electrode connected to a direct-current high-voltage transformer assembly is arranged in the feeding station, i.e. in the region of the feeding of the address label onto the bundle of articles.